Confessions of a Bondi Blonde

One more sleep and I’ll be moving out of Casa Grande, my fancy home with an aspirational address.

It’s the end of my world as I know it, particularly:

• Having to buzz in my friends via  an intercom.
• Watching in grainy black and white video the charity collectors, debt collectors and the ex-partner who buzz repeatedly, ineffectually for access to this Rapunzel fortress.
• Having a bigger home than most of my friends.
• Sharing the dining room every 25 December with the ghosts of Christmas’ past  when I believed that it was a stable family home.
• Sleepless nights working out how soon this bricks and mortar asset could prop up my perilous financial ruin. For while the wolf may have to buzz to get to the door, he was getting uncomfortably close to jumping the fence instead.
• Waiting for the dust to settle, the coast to clear, the lawyers to feed and for the house to sell.
• Being endlessly patient while the adrenalin kept pumping, telling me to run, run, run, get the hell away.

And, for me, it’s the end of a major life chapter. The marriage chapter. It’s after the “happily ever after” fairytale, and to my surprise it’s not so Grimm after all. I am happy, though my prince did come along, turning into a frog.

It’s Spring, and I’m getting a newer, smaller, cheaper house. I’m moving down in the world, but I’m paying the bills. I’ve disposed of the too-big pieces of furniture via auction. They’ll go to clot up the arterial hallways and living rooms of some other impressive show house. The auction money will go towards a puppy for the kids and an all-inclusive holiday on a mid-market cruise ship for us all.

Now, thinking it through, the big question that I have skirted recently is…. am I happy to be divorced? Obviously, if you consider the children the answer has to be “no”. Our family life was mostly sunny with limited cloudy patches of parental conflict. And even though it was effectively a single parent family a whole heap of the time, there were moments of sunshine, completeness and unquestionable security that only a nuclear family can provide. A functional unit of mum, dad and the kids is what most of us were raised to aspire to, even before the Howard years. And while it was there, it was great. But that’s over now and though I miss my kids every second of every second weekend away, these days with daddy do allow me to guiltlessly finish work, meet friends, drink coffee, read newspapers and sleep….

Exiting the relationship was as hard as you’d expect, though the wash up of pain is way past the high tide mark now, two years on. There are still lots of jagged flotsam of conflict still floating dangerously around, but, for the most part, I’ve moved comfortably on from being a very tarnished trophy wife to becoming a working single mum. I haven’t had too many slugs of gin or Botox on the way or had bigger, firmer breasts implanted, so I have survived more or less intact.

And I do admit that moving on has had its pluses. I feel a bit like George Lucas must have when he had his “Eureka” moment and realised that there was more life in the Star Wars franchise, even after the story had ended and the key protagonists were dead. I’ve realised that you just add more chapters to the book.

Divorce has added at least one new chapter to my life. Rather than slipping into comfortable middle-youth, busy with soccer, tuckshop, part-time, school friendly McWork, and continuing to support the primary breadwinner in all facets of the support he required, I now have simplified it all to – me and the kids first and all the rest after. If I don’t want to cook for me, I don’t. I hate ironing. I don’t do it. I have failed at being a wife, so I am quite happy to drop all the silly stuff that Homemaking 101 involved. The kids are doing well in school, sport, music, friends, and life. Me too.

I have, to my surprise, found it relatively easy to find real, clever work that uses my mind without exploiting my time. I dress nicely and talk with authority to busy, successful people who don’t seem to mind paying for my skills, as nascent as I fear they are. I haven’t really allowed myself too much self doubt, as this is a luxury I simply can’t afford. I need the money that flows to confident people way too much.

Put simply, if my life was a Mills and Boon novel, rather than being 192 pages long (which every single Mills and Boon novel is), I’d have to add at least another 50 pages. For the new work, opportunities, conflicts (surmountable) and…. romance? Another happily ever after?

Not wanting to get too far ahead of myself here, and, as moving requires all sorts of lists of installations, disconnections, floor plans and redirections, here’s a list of the things I am most looking forward to in the next few weeks:

• Making my bed with clean sheets and sleeping under the roof of my new home.
• Using the clothes line for sun-crisped clothes, as I only had a dryer in my old house.
• Finding a good local coffee shop.
• Having our first family barbecue.
• Getting the post, addressed to my maiden name at my new address.
• Planting basil, poppies, coriander and mint in a little garden bed.
• Drinking a glass of good champagne on the balcony, hopefully accompanied by the good wishes of friends and the chirping of cicadas.
• Having my children sleeping with the new puppy at the foot of their bed, while I make plans at the kitchen table for our new life chapter, cheaper, stronger, forward focussed, happy.
• Saying hello to friendly neighbours.
• Saying goodbye to this house and this too-long chapter.

I looked at lyrics and poems about moving out to include in this post. And sorry that I haven’t written in such a long time. After a big think, I’ve decided to take the Bondi Blonde with me to the next bit rather than pack her away with the St Vinnie’s box of crockery, bad prints and slightly torn children’s books. So she’ll be around for quite a bit yet, I think.

And she’ll have new tales of derring do and derring don’ts as well. I’m still Blonde, still standing, still prevaricating from packing and still writing silly stuff about my happily inconsequential life.

Bye-bye Casa Grande, I hope that your new owners have all the riches that are needed to keep you pretty Just the Way you Are with enough left over to keep them happy too! So while I am in a retro mood, let’s end on another Billy Joel moment:

“And it seems such a waste of time
If that’s what it’s all about
Mama, If that’s movin’ up then I’m movin’ out!”